Publications

The field of frugal innovation is an area that brings together thinkers from a variety of training backgrounds to create a supportive ecosystem to advance the reserach and development of strategies and best practices in this innovation space.

The Frugal Innovation Lab takes advantage of our position in Silicon Valley and within Santa Clara University to unite field based practice, and industry acument, with acadmic excellence. Our goal is to produce substative resources that are generative contributions to the frugal innovation dialogue for both the reserachers and practitioner of frugal innovation.

As the center of economic growth shifts from developed to developing countries, global companies should focus on innovation to win in low-cost, high-growth countries. Their survival elsewhere may depend on it.
The vibrancy of emerging-market growth will not be the only major disruption reshaping the global economy in the next ten years, but it may prove the most profound. This decade will mark the tipping point in a fundamental long-term economic rebalancing that will likely leave traditional Western economies with a lower share of global GDP in 2050 than they had in 1700. Read the full profile »

In 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world?s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed ?lean manufacturing?. Read the full profile »